Made in Abyss and characters going through brutal things

So what happened is that I saw someone on Twitter wondering if they
should catch up on Made in Abyss, because they'd heard (and seen
from screenshots) that some brutal and unpleasant things happened
to the characters and were partly wondering if the show was being
gratuitous with them. This sparked a stream of thoughts on Twitter:

Made in Abyss's latest episodes are wrenching and powerful, but are
they necessary? And is this a question that matters?

I don't think MiA's events were gratuitous or overdone & things mostly
focused on the emotional impact. The body horror was probably needed.

'Body horror' is not quite the right description for 'people getting hurt
badly', but Twitter has length limits. The show definitely presented
the situation in a way that was intended to make it wrenching;
this was not pleasant, pretty, antiseptic stuff, it was visceral
and cringe-inducing and painful to watch. Within the context of the
episodes I don't think the show dwelt on things in a way that would
have made it torture porn or pain porn; the focus was very much on how
all of these horrible things affected the characters, especially Reg.
The horrible things got shown to give Reg's reactions context and weight,
and the show framed things claustrophobically to focus on this (cf,
which has spoilers).

As for the overall necessity, we have to wait and see how the story
develops. I think there are early promising signs based on Nanachi.

That the events in the episode are non-gratuitous doesn't necessarily
mean that the episode itself (and those events) are actually necessary.
We won't know how necessary the events were overall until we see the
story and the show's themes develop more. However, I think there are
already clear promising signs, because the course of the story has
clearly shifted after the events of episode 10.

Story elements don't necessarily have to have a point; they can be
there for emotional impact. But terror and pain are empty w/o a
meaning.
Made in Abyss certainly delivered emotional impact. Whether it used
too much terror & pain for that is still open and also a personal
call.

This is the question of whether the question in my initial tweet even matters.
If Made in Abyss episodes 10 and 11 evoke such a strong emotional
reaction from us, do they have to be 'necessary' in the larger scale
of the plot? After all, stories are in large part about the emotional
reactions they evoke and episode 10 certainly did that.

I don't have an answer but I do have an opinion, which is that some
ways of evoking emotional responses are cheaper, easier, and more
shallow than others. Kicking a puppy is a bad cliche for a good reason.
Tormenting characters just to get a reaction from the audience is lazy
and unappealing, and in the process it lessens the impact of the entire
work. I personally don't think that Made in Abyss has crossed this line,
but then I'm a jaded anime watcher.

(And I will admit that there are caution signs in some things in Made in
Abyss, things that came up in passing that I'm not sure really needed to
be there. Some of these questionable bits have been there from early on in
the show.)

Checking in on the Summer 2017 anime season 'midway' through

It's time once again for a much of the way through update on my earlier
impressions of this season. By this point both my
views and my expectations have solidified, although I'm still hoping for
a surprise or two.

Still excellent:

Made in Abyss: I recently characterized this as a quest without
active opposition (so far), where the
obstacle in the way of Riko and Reg is the Abyss itself, with its
creatures and its very nature. The show is doing extremely well at
portraying this and making things feel real, and it's been a very
enjoyable ride despite the fact that we keep being told that Riko
is never coming back from the journey she's making.

With that said, I have no idea where the show is going and how
it's going to come to a satisfying ending point. But the ride is so
interesting that I don't care.

Very good, surprisingly:

Princess Principal: The show has remained fully committed to its
core nature and as a result has delivered a whole series of episodes
with pretty solid impacts (and a few that were just fun), even if
they're nothing novel in terms of plots. I've been particularly taken
with the writing, which is often (although not always) willing to let
things be indirect and count on us to get it.

This has turned out much better than I would have expected from the
premise.

Good:

Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: It's more Symphogear and it's
being very itself by leaning into its over the top stuff and
building on bits and pieces of past seasons in a way that makes
its world feel real and lived-in. It's absurd, of course, but
Symphogear has always been an absurd show.

My Hero Academia: The show continues to move along pretty well,
mostly avoiding the pacing pitfalls of the first season and the
tournament pitfalls of the first part of this season. MHA isn't
great but I do like watching it. It has charm.

Popcorn watching:

Knight's & Magic: This remains more or less pure-hearted fun, although
in the long shadow of Gundam it's hard to
have the cheerful reaction to a war between two groups of humans that
I think the show wants me to have, especially when it kills plenty of
people on screen. For now I'm ignoring the cognitive dissonance and
enjoying it anyway.

Fate/Apocrypha: This has mostly delivered on a stream of reasonably
spectacular fights with only a few diversions into annoying attempts
at philosophy and character development and so on (all of which Fate
is generally terrible at). Unfortunately, while I enjoy Astolfo and
Mordred goofing around, my actual investment in any of the characters
is almost nil so all of the action mostly feels empty and pointless.

Dropped:

A Centaur's Life: I wound up feeling that the only thing the show
had going for it was its gimmick, and with the show's bland and so-so
production, that wasn't enough to keep me watching. I have some
theories about why this material worked much better in manga form than
animated, but that's for another entry.

The Reflection: After watching a number of episodes I realized that I was
only interested in it as a peculiar and interesting artifact, not as
something to actually watch. I wasn't particularly invested in either
the characters or the plot and the writing could be painful.

I've got enough shows that I want to watch that I've felt no particular
need to seek out more or dig into my backlog (the latter is kind of a
pity, since I have some good stuff I want to get to someday). More shows
and more good to excellent shows would be nice, but I'm okay with what I
have.

Brief impressions of the Summer 2017 anime season so far

I'm somewhere between three and five episodes into everything I'm
watching, which is long enough for most shows to show their cards and
for my opinions to firm up. So, as usual, here's
how my views of this season have shaken out, to follow up on my first
episode reactions.

Excellent but alarming:

Made in Abyss: This is clearly the best show I'm watching and
everything so far has been pretty much universally excellent, but it
has been building up an increasingly ominous atmosphere and there's
all sorts of rumblings that the manga version goes unpleasant places
(and if the anime does too, I'm probably going to drop the show).
It's also simply an impressive show, in art, animation, writing,
and directing.

Good:

Princess Principal: This is a limited taste, because the show
mixes completely serious material side by side with stuff
that it's impossible to take seriously. But the show is fully
committed to this (in the same way Thunderbolt Fantasy was) and has made it work so far.
Not everything has been completely successful but it's solidly
entertaining anyway.

Senki Zesshou Symphogear AXZ: After a bit of a quiet start where
the show did not, say, slice a chunk out of the middle of a mountain in
the first episode, AXZ has been steadily ramping up its stakes. It
is and remains very Symphogear, which means that it's both over the
top and sincere.

Decent to okay:

A Centaur's Life: This is basically slice of life in a science
fiction setting. I read a bit of the manga several years ago and felt
that it was both charming overall and reasonably well done, with an
interesting mix of genres that could be nicely subtle. The animated
version is a little bit less impressive because it's periodically kind
of plain and flat in aesthetics and directing.

Unlike some people, I think that the anime is overall reasonably well
done. It's not flashy or 'strong' in some senses, but I've enjoyed
elements like some nice character acting. On the other hand, I'm sort
of feeling that I'm not going to keep watching the show for its entire
run, so maybe I'm fooling myself about the overall production quality.

Popcorn watching:

Fate/Apocrypha: I'm not watching this for the plot or the Fate lore;
seeing as this is a Fate show, both are likely to be stupid or
irritating, and in any case both are far too complicated and require
far too much background reading for me. Instead I'm watching this for
a certain amount of nice animation and a few characters who are amusing
and interesting, and so far it has delivered on enough of both to keep
me watching.

(I was actually pleased by a certain plot twist in episode 4, because
I found the character involved to be kind of a wet blanket. Of course,
Fate shows usually leave me irritated at almost every character.)

Knight's & Magic: This is what I will call 'competency porn'; you have
a character who is very good at something and they do that
something a lot, ideally in interesting and amusing situations
and with some obstacles in the way. As I've said on Twitter,
the show is so earnestly enthusiastic about things that it's
charming, despite the basic story-telling limitations. See
also this interesting post on K&M's heart-on-sleeve appeal by @iblessall.

In ongoing shows, My Hero Academia continues to be enjoyable to watch,
although it has recently started to slip back into the excessive padding
habits of the first season. I have tacitly dropped Re:Creators as not
sufficiently compelling to make me care enough to watch another episode.

I recently saw the first episode of The
Reflection and had some reactions on Twitter. I'm not sure
what I feel about the show but it's interesting enough that I'm going
to watch the second episode at some point. One way to put my longer
term reaction to The Reflection so far is that I'm not sure it really
feels like an anime show instead of a show about American superheroes
that inexplicably happens to be in Japanese. Not that there's anything
wrong with the latter, if it's well done.

Looking back at the Spring 2017 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional
look back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to follow
up on my early impressions and my midway views. I could say that nothing really changed from the
midway, but that's actually not quite true; I think that two shows
actually picked themselves up at the end (WorldEnd and Alice &
Zoroku).

Pretty much excellent:

Eccentric Family second season: Okay, however painful it is for me
to admit this, I will; Eccentric Family's second season is not
as compelling as the first season was. That doesn't make it bad;
the show was still great, beautiful, periodically both touching and
scary, and funny, and it's clearly the best show of the season for me.
But however intellectually interesting I found what I think is its
broad theme, it's probably not going to
stick in my memory and my heart the way that the first season did.

Alice & Zoroku: This show is simply a treasure; it's a show
that focuses on children and makes it work (see @iblessall's
article for more here).
Looking back, everything drove Sana's story even when it didn't
entirely seem to, and her character arc was a great one. Everything
I said in my midway views still applies.

Alice & Zoroku is probably objectively better than WorldEnd, but
WorldEnd is more my kind of show than A&Z is so it's got a slightly
higher position in my heart.

Good:

My Hero Academia: The second season of MHA has handily eclipsed
the first one, not necessarily because the material is better but
more because the show has worked out how to make its relatively slow
pace work for it instead of against it. Since the basic material has
always been compelling, removing this road block has turned a show
that I liked despite itself into one that is genuinely interesting
(despite structural problems like a sports tournament, which is
fortunately over now and the show's moved on to more interesting
stuff).

Still on the edge and maybe dropping off:

Re:Creators: Each episode usually is just good enough to get me
to watch the next one, but it pushes closer and closer to the edge
almost every time. It doesn't help that some recent events have made
me feel that a room full of smart characters are missing one obvious
thing, and that I'm even thinking about
plot holes means that the show isn't fully engaging me.

I solidly enjoyed the first four shows here and found myself pretty
much satisfied with the season as a result. Would I have liked more
good things to watch? Sure, but unlike in some past seasons I didn't
feel sufficiently bored to go searching out other things for popcorn
watching and so on.

Some different ways that story endings can be satisfying

I've said before a number of times that what I find satisfying in the
endings of shows isn't necessarily what other people do. Today I want
to write a bit about that and about some different ways that endings
can be satisfying.

As humans, we have a natural desire for our stories to make sense. We
can tolerate a certain amount of not understanding things during the
story, but by the end we would really like to know what happened and why
it happened and so on; we would like to feel that there was cause and
effect, not just randomness. A satisfying ending is in part an ending
that makes the story make sense (and makes sense given the rest of the
story). However there are different ways that the ending can make things
make sense and be satisfying, or perhaps a better way of putting it is
that there are different things that an ending can make sense of.

A narratively satisfying ending is one that tells us what happened;
it resolves the important open plot issues from the story and answers
hanging questions, all in a way that makes sense. It gives us narrative
closure. In a traditional mystery story, a narratively satisfying ending
tells us who did it, how, and why; it is the master detective explaining
everything to the audience and the criminal being led off in handcuffs.
In an action show, it is the final confrontation with the villains
and the victory of the heroes. In a show with important previously
unexplained mysteries, a narratively satisfying ending explains them
well enough to pacify us (shows often have trouble here, though).

(What is an important unexplained mystery varies from person to
person.)

An emotionally satisfying ending is one that answers the
emotional, character centered questions raised by the story,
giving us emotional closure. When you have dramatic characters in a story, an emotionally satisfying
ending resolves their character arcs and says that yes, they changed,
grew, dealt with their issues, found the answers they were looking for,
and so on. In stories with romances, an emotionally satisfying ending is
often one that answers the question of whether the ostensible couple is
going to get together.

It's entirely possible to have a story ending that's narratively
satisfying or emotionally satisfying without dealing with the other side
at all. An extreme example of this is the Neon Genesis Evangelion
TV series, where the last two episodes were at least an attempt at an
emotionally satisfying ending that said absolutely nothing narratively.
The resulting fan clamour allegedly led to End of Evangelion,
where Anno shoved a grotesque 'narratively
satisfying' ending down everyone's throat. We wanted to know what
happened? Anno would tell us, even though we weren't going to enjoy it
in the least.

It's relatively common for romance-focused shows to have an emotionally
satisfying ending that doesn't attempt narrative closure. Here the core
question of the show has always been 'will they get together', and the
ending says 'yes they will' without showing us the details of how that
plays out. This is the ending with the couple finally kissing for the
first time and we shift to the end credits. The first season of Nodame
Cantabile ended this way; the core emotional question of the show was
always if Chiaki would come to love Nodame, and the ending of the first
season said 'yes', even though it didn't cover the actual process of
them getting together as a couple.

For me, Concrete Revolutio is an example of a show with a narratively
but not emotionally satisfying ending. CR's ending told us exactly
what happened and how, and in the process explained the big villain
and so on. But it didn't really feel like it resolved many of the
character issues, and instead dropped some of them on the floor. An older example is the ending of
Eureka Seven AO, and if I want to go to a really
extreme point there is the ending of Gilgamesh.

As an anime watcher, what I generally care about are emotionally
satisfying endings. The story has to more or less make narrative sense
by the end and I don't like gaping plot holes, but I don't demand to
know the narrative details of what happens next and how everything
resolves itself if the broad outlines are clear from the emotional
closure. For instance, I thought that the first season of Nodame
Cantabile was perfectly fine on its own and didn't really need any
sequels (and I eventually lost interest in said sequels). This is not a
universal position by any means; there are plenty of people who care a
lot more about narrative closure than I do (and they are not wrong; this
is a taste issue).

(Nor do I need all the mysteries to be addressed, even relatively
important ones, cf Shingu and some of its unaddressed ones, and also. What mysteries need
to be addressed and which don't is something I'm going to wave my
hands about for now.)

Symphogear AXZ ep 1: Really it's the same as it ever was. The show's
wisely not tried to top the start of last season & just gone straight.
→

Made in Abyss #1: On the one hand, this was a great starting episode;
it had fun, great characters, solid writing, great animation, etc.
→
On the other hand, I keep hearing that Made in Abyss's story goes really
grim & dark. I guess I'll keep watching until things get terrible.
→

There are a few other shows that look potentially interesting if I was
really wanted more things to watch, like Restaurant to Another World
and maybe Altair: A Record of Battles, but so far I'm fine with only
watching this much. As usual I'm skipping all of the shorts, especially
since none of them sound particularly attractive.

@UgokiGyokuyou:
lol you want censorship? Take down all those fanvids/fanfictions and
prevent new ones to be uploaded?

@cks_anime:
Taking Altair stuff down would probably attract too much attention,
but they could make sure that Altair-related content is kept quiet.
Eg have Altair stuff lower down on 'popular <X>' pages than it should
be, and don't let new fanvids/etc show up very high no matter what.
The latter is especially important since we've been told that popular
new fanvids can give Altair new, expanded powers. That's v. dangerous.

Re:Creators has essentially explicitly stated that Creations in
general and Altair in specific derive their power and their abilities
from having an audience see and accept things with the character in them
(manga, games, novels, anime, art, fan works, and so on). Since Altair
is a standalone creation, entirely based on fan-created materials,
she has no 'canon' to shape, define, and limit her the way that other
Creations do; instead, everything comes from fans watching fan-made
videos and art on the in-show equivalents of NicoNico and Pixiv and
making them popular. It's been explicitly stated that some of Altair's
dangerous powers come from secondary fan videos, ones made not by
Altair's initial creator but instead made as goofy bits and pieces by
other fans, then given power by enough people seeing and enjoying them.

It's probably too late to wipe Altair's existing videos and art
from the NicoNico and Pixiv equivalents; fans would probably notice,
there would be a controversy, and you'd cue the Streisand effect, which is exactly
what our protagonists don't want. A similar thing holds about actively
blocking new Altair-related content from appearing at all. However, you
can certainly do things to limit the damage. Visibility and popularity
rankings are generally opaque and reasonably subtle manipulations of
them are unlikely to be noticed and reacted to. So NicoNico and Pixiv
could be coerced to slowly and quietly lower the ranking and prominence
of existing Altair-related content, and especially to manipulate their
systems so that new content would not be seen by a large audience by,
for example, appearing at the top of 'hot new content' pages even if it
normally should.

(New content is especially dangerous because popular new content can
probably give Altair new and expanded powers, in the same way that
secondary fan videos has already given her some that weren't in her
original video source.)

This is not big or loud, and it's not fast, but the characters in
Re:Creators are already playing a relatively long game with a
six-month action plan. They might as well use the government power they
have access to and this time in an attempt not just to build themselves
up but to quietly undercut Altair's base of power, that being her
audience. Every bit helps and they have an uphill struggle.

Concrete Revolutio: Raito Shiba as Jiro Hitoyoshi's tragic mirror

(There are spoilers here, in as much as I can spoil a show that's been
over for a year.)

In the first season of Concrete Revolutio, one of the mysteries was
what happened to Raito Shiba to turn him from a police detective into
what he became instead (however you want to describe it). The first
episode in Concrete Revolutio's second season finally answered this,
and in the process it made Raito Shiba the most tragic character in
Concrete Revolutio for me, because he is the tragic mirror to Jiro
Hitoyoshi.

Both Raito and Jiro begin the show driven by the desire to follow justice
and do right. This naturally raises the question of what is justice and
rightness (this question is at the core of Jiro's self-definition), and the show spends a great deal of its
run showing us that things in the real world are more and more complicated
and more and more grey. There is simply not a clear, straightforward,
general answer to the question. Justice, law, and right can all conflict
with each other; attempts to use simple black and white answers can
lead to terrible results. The truth, says Concrete Revolutio, is that
concepts such as 'justice' are situational and even personal. You cannot
boil them down to rules.

Both Jiro and Raito struggle with this over the course of the series.
Both start out believing that this is simple and they can always see
the way forward; they both find out that they are wrong. As the series
progresses, Jiro becomes more and more willing to make situational
decisions for the sake of his own personal sense of justice and rightness,
and less and less willing to stick to rules and laws when they lead to
a result that he feels are wrong.

The same conflict breaks Raito. In episode 14, "The Superhumans of
November", he is fully faced with a messy conflict of justice where
there is no simple morally correct answer. Raito knows it and admits
it in his own thoughts. But rather than accept that the world is messy
and complicated and not amenable to the rigid rules that he wants,
Raito entirely rejects everything to do with the idea. He goes so far
as to murder a sentient being in order to lobotomize himself, willingly
locking himself into the shackles of a rigid black and white view of
the world even though he knows this view is flawed (he rejects that
knowledge, though).

This is what makes Raito the tragic mirror of Jiro (and a tragic character
in general). Both faced the same issues and challenges, but Raito broke
where Jiro made his way through. Raito shows both us and Jiro a path
that a different version of Jiro might have taken, and I think that Jiro
sees at least something of this and it's why he interacts with Raito as
he does.

(Having locked himself into a black and white view of the world,
having deliberately made himself completely convinced of the justice
and correctness of his actions, Raito of course winds up reaching the
morally horrifying decisions that he does in the third episode of the
first season. If you make decisions based on logic and rules, with no
regard for the reality of the world and the moral dimensions of what
you're proposing, of course you wind up with horrors that you have
perfect justifications for.)

(This is probably an obvious observation, but it's been on my mind
for some time and so I'm writing it down to get it out of my head.
Even a year later, Concrete Revolutio is still not a forgettable
show, even if I feel it was a flawed one.)

The best N anime that I saw in 2016

Normally I write my 'best N' yearly entries relatively soon after the end
of the year, although 2015's slipped into February. This
time around things have been extensively delayed, and while part of that
is because I got lazy after I initially missed my usual window, part of
that is because I've felt genuinely conflicted and confused about my views
this time around. This delay matters to me because the more I delay, the
more my feelings can fade and the more perspective I can wind up with,
so I like to write these entries while my feelings are relatively hot
(I can always look back at them later).

As usual for these retrospectives, this is what I consider to be to be
the best or most enjoyable things that I saw in calendar 2016 (regardless
of when they were made or released, although this year most of what I
saw was actually from this year). As is now standard, my general rule
is that only shows that have actually ended count because you never
know what eye-rolling things a show may finish up with. This year, this
excludes March comes in like a Lion, which would otherwise rank highly
(cf).

Flip Flappers: I will summarize it this way; I have come to think
that Flip Flappers is ultimately about joy. Underlying all of its
events is a celebration of coming to enjoy life, of going from a grey
existence to a colourful one. In many ways it's not a deep show that
tackles complex subjects with delicate characterization, but I don't
care. Celebrating joy is as worthwhile as deep drama, when done well,
and Flip Flappers did it well (cf,
and). Flip Flappers is also
structured and written in ways that appeal to me; I'm always going
to have a soft spot for a smartly written show that plays with the
structure of the story, is confident enough to start things in media
res (and makes that work), and so on.

One thing worth special mention is that Flip Flappers, like
Kyousougiga before it, is a show that could only have
been done as anime. It would not work in any other media in anything
like its current form; it absolutely requires and takes advantage of
the particular strengths of anime. Even the contrast between realistic
animation and how animation typically looks is something the show
takes advantage of for story purposes in the last episode.

Thunderbolt Fantasy: This is a show that delivered perfectly on what
it was aiming for, and as it happens I quite like its genre. It was
smartly written, well executed, and completely nailed some moments. I wrote more on the power of TF
fully embracing its genre to
explain its appeal to me. If you want the capsule version, it is
that Thunderbolt Fantasy had terrific execution on a story and
in a genre that I quite like.

Flying Witch: This is another quiet show about joy and pleasant
experiences. It is full of fun moments and run through with bits
of awe, where the world unfolds in beauty in front of us and the
characters, and it doesn't hurt that it is more or less in one of the
genres that I like (broadly 'fantasy mixed with ordinary life').
But ultimately Flying Witch has also shown me the limits of
trying to analyze something; beyond
everything else, I loved it. And that's good enough for me.

Special mixed feelings award:

Concrete Revolutio: Oh how the great wound up falling. At the
end of 2015 I expected CR to rate quite highly
when it finished, and I still stand by my very high views of its
first half. Unfortunately its second half was frustratingly mixed.
Some episodes were great (episode 14 is a special standout for me),
but others dragged even if (and when) they turned out to be
thematically important. And in the end the show got sloppy and left me with very mixed
feelings, and this was always a show where the ending was going
to be quite important for its overall impact. Still, the show
did some excellent work with the overall plot even in the second
half (I especially liked how the ultimate villain nicely made
sense in retrospect).

In the end I have wound up feeling that Concrete Revolutio
ultimately bit off more than it could chew. It did very good
work some of the time and the first season remains impressive
but the overall result is not something that I can put into my
'best shows of the year' ranking, although there's part of me
that wishes I could love it as much as some other people
do.

(This impression has only grown on me since the show ended,
as my ability to remember details about what happened in the
second season and when has faded. That fading is not a good
sign for a show's ultimate impact on me.)

Things I consider good but not necessarily memorable over the long
term:

Sound! Euphonium second season: I want to love this more than
I do, but in the end nothing in it seems as important or as driving
as the first season did. I at least saw an interesting and powerful
overall theme in the first season (one that was executed very well),
and I just don't see that in the second season; to me it came across
more as filling in side stories. Still, the second season has its
own beautiful and touching moments, some spectacular character work,
and funny bits (and a genuine surprise).
See more words in my fall retrospective.

My view of the second season is unquestionably brought down by how
the show treats Reina's stupid crush on Taki-sensei in a relatively
favorable light.

Girls und Panzer der Film: This is a great film that takes
everything that made Girls und Panzer such a good sports action show and turned it up to movie quality
and movie length. I enjoyed it whole-heartedly.

BBK/BRNK: The show was a well executed fun ride with more smarts
in its writing and characters than I would have expected. It had
moments of quiet beauty and affecting character turns and in
general it was straight up enjoyable. Yes, I'm waving my hands.

Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash: This wasn't flawless but it was both
solidly consistent and good to excellent throughout. It had powerful
and affecting stories to tell and it told them well, and in the end
its flaws are sufficiently small for my memories to smooth them over
in a way that I can't for other shows.

ERASED aka Boku Dake ga Inai Machi: At its best the show was
beautiful and affecting, and it was at its best for quite a while.
But outside of those episodes, it often rapidly descended into an
unexciting, cliched thriller. In the end I cannot ignore the bad
bits and focus only on the good ones, no more than I could for
Concrete Revolutio, and so the overall show ranks no higher
than here.

Kiznaiver: If I was going to write an unkind summary of the show,
I would say that the show got the mood right but the plot wrong.
For the most part the show was about the characters interacting with
each other, and that part was great; the bits that didn't entirely
work were mostly at the end, where the plot heaved itself to the
surface. But I enjoyed the whole thing enough to forgive the show
those not so great portions and I look back on it reasonably fondly.

Gakusen Toshi Asterisk: I didn't like the second season as much
as I liked the first season, but the whole show remains a great example
of a very well done popcorn show. Very well done popcorn shows are
unfortunately rarer than they should be; all too often the middling
quality of their source material also leads to middling execution
or worse. Asterisk stands for the premise that you can make an
unambitious but excellent show from such material (and not just by
throwing fight animation firepower at it).

Long Riders: It's not often that I run into a show that might as well
be aimed straight at one of my soft spots, but Long Riders
is one and I'll probably always remember
it affectionately for that. LR is the best bicycling-focused show
that I've watched and I'm not sure there ever will be a better one,
because I'm not really interested in bicycle racing (which is the
obvious thing to build a bicycling show around, cf Yowamushi Pedal).

Special 'flawed but manic' award:

Space Patrol Luluco: There was definitely something here, but it was
hidden under a slather of Trigger callbacks and references and it
didn't really speak to me in any case. See my spring retrospective for more.

My notes say that I finished 29 shows, OVAs, and movies in 2016, which
is down significantly from 2015 but up slightly from
2014. A fair number of them were not memorable or good
enough to make this year's list, although some hovered on the edge
(the closest is probably Dimension W).

(I also dropped a significant number of shows, some of them otherwise well
regarded like Macross Delta and Kuromukuro. Twin Star Exorcists was
also a pretty good show until it stumbled with a timeskip and lost me.)

I'm not sure how the highs of 2016 compare to previous years. Probably
nothing equals Shirobako from 2015, but then that is
a very high bar. I'm likely to remember Thunderbolt Fantasy for quite
some time, but partly that's because of how exceptional it is in both
genre and style (I'm not going to forget the puppets any time soon,
and Shang's character speaks to me). Will Flip Flappers stick in my
memories as much as Kyousougiga has? Ask me in five years.

My view: Eccentric Family's second season is about growing up

A lot of things happened in the first season of Eccentric Family,
but to the extent that it had an overarching theme and development,
I remember it as being about family and the Shimogamos coming to
(somewhat) deal with their father's death as they learned about what
happened in that crucial time. The result was often spectacular. However, this
left plenty of room for exploring both the characters and the setting,
and simply having some really beautiful and affecting adventures.

Eccentric Family's second season is different. In particular, I have
come around to the idea that it is strongly focused on forcing all of the
Shimogamo brothers to grow up and to move beyond the comfortable stasis
that they had been in after their father's death (and for Yasaburo,
probably even before then). The first season did cause some character
development, but looking back I think that it mostly affirmed and revealed
character, not changed it (Yajiro being the exception). You can't say the
same of the second season; by the time it ends, Yajiro, Yaichiro, and
especially Yasaburo have made major changes to the paths of their lives.

The Shimogamo brothers are not the only people to grow up and change,
either. Almost the entirety of Benten's arc is about cracking her shell
of omniscient invulnerability, and the last episode reveals that the
Nidaime is also stuck on the past, unable to move on. All of the major
characters in the second season need to grow, and all of them get hard
shoves about it. No one gets out unchanged and unaffected.

(The one prominent character who refuses to grow and change pays a
heavy price for their inability to let go. Twice.)

Things with Yasaburo and Benten especially stand out to me. In a way it
would have been easy for the show to let Yasaburo continue through his
life with the crowd-pleasing ambiguity and indecision that he showed
in the first season and much of the second. The interplay between
Benten and Yasaburo is always enjoyable and great, and they have such a
complicated and deep relationship that things could have continued for
a long time. But the second season does not let the situation stand and
in the end Yasaburo is forced to get off the fence; it's clear that his
relationship with Benten will be quite different from now on.

(I mentioned this on Twitter and I feel
like saying a bit more about it, even if this is not as coherent as I
had in mind when I started writing.)